Introducing Business Communications Operations Management (BCOM) - A New Management and Operations Paradigm

9 Mar 2015

This article explains the communication industry's transformation from a device or line-centric management model to a user-centric, or business-centric model. As a result of this industry transformation, the new Business Communication Operations Management (BCOM) category has emerged. This paper explains the capabilities and advantages of this new category and what it can mean for organizations looking to maximize the performance and effectiveness of their communication platform.

Communications Industry Evolution - From Line- or Device-Centric to User-Centric

Over the last 10 years, business communications systems have changed dramatically. In the early 2000s the average company had a simple voice telephony communications system running on a dedicated wiring plan. These platforms managed the entire system based on phone numbers, with user names only associated for Caller ID. Today, communications system sophistication is exploding in multiple dimensions. New media like video and IM are combining with presence, mobility, conferencing and Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) to make an exponentially wider set of configurable elements, often as different applications with unique interfaces and on different servers.

Where old phone systems typically had one telephone per user, today each user may have many devices: a phone, smartphone, tablet, soft client, and more. For many organizations the new set of solutions are often provided by multiple vendors as well and need to be aligned with a variety of other IT systems. This wide range of capabilities and devices has meant that the traditional line-centric approach doesn't work anymore. In addition, where change used to happen only when a user moved offices, now a multiplicity of user and business events through the lifecycle that drive change, which can result in ten or a hundred times as many changes.

Increasing Sophistication of Business Communications

Figure 1 Increasing Sophistication of Business Communications

Figure 1 shows how the sophistication is increasing in two distinct dimensions. The horizontal axis shows the increase in elements and systems managed. This includes the rapid increase in the number and variety of devices, solutions with multiple vendors, Lync integration, centralization, etc. The vertical axis shows the dramatic increase of the sophistication in terms of new media types and integrating these systems with business processes and
applications, ultimately driving the need for a more user-centric
approach.

The challenge is that most companies are using tools and capabilities designed for the environment of the lower left box, while the communications systems and solutions have moved to cover the entire spectrum to the upper right.

Another key impact of the new sophistication is a significant increase in the actual number of lifecycle events that a UC team must accommodate. In the past, a telephone event like a move would occur once every two or three years per user. In today's enterprise communications systems, the number of changes throughout the lifecycles of the solution that cause a management event is increasing as shown in Figure 2. The result is a multiplicity of the demands on the operational team; the number of events, and the complexity of performing the configuration tasks to complete those events, are increasing at significant rates.

Increasing Rate of Change Events

Figure 2 Increasing Rate of Change Events Driven by Sophistication

The Consequence for Enterprise Communications

A clear way to see what has happened is to look at the challenges in managing and operating a modern business communications system. Figure 3 shows all of the typical elements for a large organization.

Manual Configuration Methods are Challenged

Figure 3 Traditional Manual Configuration Methods are Challenged to Meet the Increased Demands of Advanced Business Communications and UC

While smaller organizations may have a reduced number of business communication systems, the impact is still very challenging. As Figure 3 shows, not only are there potentially multiple vendors, but even within a single vendor, there are often separate configuration and management interfaces for different elements.

Figure 3 also shows the variety of change events that occur through the solution lifecycle that drive the need to configure and change the elements. In the center (Operational Tools) are the limited systems to help manage operations. Many organizations have no new plan to manage this dramatic increase in sophistication and increasing events, and instead simply continue to use the methods that worked in the past. These methods include manual processes where trained and experienced individuals perform sophisticated configurations based on business rules for each event after receiving a work request to do so.

UC Vendor Management Solutions - Still Device-Centric

In some cases, the installed communications system vendor management tools have been incorporated into this process (e.g. Cisco, Avaya, Lync, etc.). However, as shown in Figure 4, these management systems are limited in what they can support, are device-centric, and are typically designed for the vendor's own specific elements, rather than the entire system. For example, the Lync management layer does not cover critical areas such as the mediation server. While these UC vendor automation capabilities are becoming more available, they are limited to capabilities such as simple directory integration. This ultimately results in vendor lock-in.

Lifecycles

Figure 4 Typical Operations Management does not Address Lifecycles and has Very Limited Automated Configuration

The consequence is that the entire system is not managed end-to-end and only a small number of components or functions are managed with automation. The proprietary vendor integrations and required staff knowledge make vendor transitions or augmentations difficult to implement. In addition, vendor management systems typically do not provide any integration into the full lifecycle of events, which means that each management or configuration action needs to be done independently in a silo. The result is that often many critical tasks have to be performed manually to complete the lifecycle use-cases.

The impact of the current situation for most, if not all, organizations deploying advanced business communications can be dramatic, particularly for IT staff that is must configure and manage the increased number of events and the new levels of sophistication. As the number of lifecycle events rapidly increases and the complexity of managing and configuring each event also increases, the result is that additional resources are often required, errors are increasingly common, and the staff is unable to focus on key strategic areas or on the important area of user adoption. The lack of a systemized, user-centric, management structure can result in dramatically increased cost, over-provisioning of resources and licenses, failure to decommission assets not used, frequent updates and cost for minor changes to system integrator-provided solutions, and increased staff overtime. With the time it takes to provision new capabilities or respond to changes, end users become dissatisfied, potentially reducing adoption of the new capabilities or increasing the likelihood of using external services instead of IT provided solutions.

A New Approach to Enterprise Communications Management

A new category of management platforms has emerged to focus on solving these challenges. The new category is referred to as Business Communications Operations Management systems, or BCOM.

BCOM systems are process-centric or user-centric (rather than device-centric) and are designed to interface across a broad range of business communications / UC vendors, IT operations systems such as ticketing and telecom expense management, as well as to integrate to directory services. In addition, BCOM systems are designed to fully automate the lifecycle of events to make the management of a complex operational change easy. For example, a typical multi-step operational event like onboarding a new employee with multiple services, features and devices might take an experienced BC analyst 60 minutes to complete, as the analyst needs to manually configuring multiple systems and elements manually.

BCOM Solutions Automate Config and Operations

Figure 5 BCOM Solutions Automate the Configuration and Operations Process Based on Lifecycle Events

With BCOM, pre-defined templates and workflow orchestration is invoked, based on the selected user profile, their location and options chosen before kicking off the workflow. The detailed configuration process becomes a single step, is simple and can be done by general employees (i.e. you don't have to be a certified engineer to perform the task), and is fully automated for the complete end-to-end use-case. The outcome is:

Less costly changes through a reduction in human capital,
More accuracy by virtually eliminating human intervention, while maintaining full audit trails for resource analysis.

Figure 5 shows how the BCOM system becomes the cornerstone for managing the sophistication of today's advanced business communications systems. The operations now become automated based on the lifecycle events. Using both event and user templates, the process of managing the configuration becomes dramatically simplified, while at the same time being normalized, ensuring that each event is processed the same way regardless of timing or staff involved. This high level of repeatability means that over time the maintenance costs will fall as well.

BCOM systems allow the IT team to search on a user and instantly see what devices and services have been activated for that user. Intuitive business processes are just a single press of a button. Without BCOM, IT staff would have to search multiple systems to aggregate a single view of a user's current status of services and costs.

BCOM systems deliver a set of integrated management elements which focus on user and business needs.

BCOM ensures that the operational processes are tied to the user and integrated to business events through defined and standardized processes. Rather than using different mechanisms for users and processes across the variety of elements that need to be configured, BCOM provides a business-centric view, where a lifecycle event can trigger a variety of actions to deliver a complete configured result.

The very nature of BCOM systems are multi-tenant, ensuring that they can operate in both a cloud and hosted environment, and can also provide partitioning of management control within an enterprise (e.g. multi-agency government or divisional enterprise). This advanced control partitioning enables many lifecycle events to be triggered and implemented through layers of devolved administration and self-service, further reducing costs and decreasing errors. BCOM systems include integration to IT systems and applications using common APIs and web service capabilities. BCOM systems are designed to be Open Platform, with multi-vendor support, and multi-nodal capabilities.

BCOM systems provide a single point of configuration control with change tracking, auditable results, and original state recovery. A BCOM system provides a "single pane of glass" with visibility across multiple systems. Ultimately, the biggest impact of BCOM is through the simplicity that can be achieved in managing the variety and sophistication of today's business communications environments.

BCOM frees up staff to focus on high-value activities, rather than mundane configurations and processes. Integration of lifecycle events into training and programs can drive use, while the multi-vendor capabilities can enable both optimal deployments and be a critical element of managing vendor migrations.

IT Staff can focus on service delivery, new solutions value, and driving adoption through defined programs. In the end, staff can focus on transformational value instead of low-value configurations, resulting in new services, dramatically increased performance results, and overall staff satisfaction.

In migrations to new technologies like SIP or to a new vendor, decommissioning unused resources is a critical element. BCOM systems clearly show how resources are configured and consumed, enabling this process to be effectively managed. Further, BCOM systems can enable the transfer of data during a migration from a legacy platform to a new one.

Finally, BCOM is the most effective way to manage the challenges of staff growth driven by the increased sophistication in business and unified communications. Many experts estimate that operational staff costs are now 50% of the overall TCO of a business communications system and increasing. A BCOM implementation reduces or eliminates this growth in cost, while enabling the investment in human capital to focus on driving value and business velocity, rather than mundane configuration tasks. The result is that most BCOM deployments pay for themselves in less than 12 months.

BCOM is a critical component of any business communications investment today. For enterprises managing their own systems, it is the critical element to ensure both operational success as well as adoption and cost management. For service providers delivering cloud or hosted offers, integrating BCOM is essential to meeting customer expectations while managing costs and SLAs. And for an enterprise looking to move to the OPEX model of cloud and hosted solutions, having the vendor of choice use a BCOM system for their operations is a way of ensuring that your transition will be well managed and relatively painless.

Three companies are currently the leaders in the BCOM category: Kurmi Software, VOSS Solutions and Unimax Systems Corporation. Each of these companies is delivering BCOM solutions that are enabling their customers to enjoy the benefits of operational excellence, while reducing costs and increasing focus on overall UC success.

If you are embarking on a journey from basic telephony to an advanced Business Communications or Unified Communications solution, you need to look at BCOM and how it can impact your success (and lower the risk of failures). The new advanced communications solutions can be transformational, but only if they can be deployed and operated in an efficient and cost effective manner. BCOM is the key to successful deployments and ongoing adoption.

This paper is sponsored by Kurmi Software, VOSS Solutions, and Unimax.